“If it bleeds, it leads.” For over a century, that mantra has fuelled headlines and shaped how we perceive the world. But does education deserve the same grim lens?

This week, we reclaim the manifesto—not as a vehicle for doom but as a promise to ourselves to inspire change. Let’s rewrite the script, starting with optimism.

Back in the 1890s newspaper readers experienced the first “media war”.

It was initiated between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York newspapers.

Both realised that audiences were drawn to stories of shock, violence and melodrama.

“If it bleeds it leads…” became Hearst’s mantra for deciding what should hit the front page.

That mantra is still heard in some newsrooms today.

It’s also visible in debate about the state of education.

In the past few weeks I’ve a small flurry of end-of-year essays being published under the guise of ‘manifestos’. Most of them are nothing more than doom-mongering leads.

The idea of a manifesto has been much maligned. It’s how we refer to the mad scrawls left for the police to discover by terrorists and lone gunmen.

It’s how we know our politicians lied to us in order to get elected.

It’s how we now seem to frame a personal critique of education that happens to be longer than a blog post but not quite robust enough to make a book.

For the past five years, our team has done its best to reclaim the manifesto for what it was originally intended: a short, punctuated list of promises we want to keep for ourselves, to benefit others.

We wrote one with the team at Clyde Cottage Nursery that’s framed everywhere and transformed their approach to learning.

We wrote one for the International School of Brussels that became the way they talk about the importance of early years learning.

We wrote one with over 700 middle leaders that sums up the key promises they’d expect their fellow leaders to keep.

Writing your own manifesto should be an uplifting, optimistic exercise, particularly as we approach the new year.

It’s not listing out resolutions we intend to break.

Instead, the best ones are reflective of how we work when we’re at our best, so we can remember to do it again when we get back to work.

Sometimes it’s not true that grim horror, melodrama and despair grab our attention most. Help me show that’s true, by writing your own manifesto. And if you want to share it, hit reply. I’d love to read them.